Pioneers

The project

Project that unites the ports of Antwerp, Barcelona, Constanza and Venlo, to respond to the challenges of reducing their environmental impact while maintaining their competitiveness and facing the continuous growth of the maritime sector.

European Green Deal Horizon 2020

The socio-economic objectives of the European Green Deal and its promotion of a blue economy pose various challenges to ports seeking to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions greenhouse effect without losing competitiveness and facing the growing demand for maritime transport. The ports of Antwerp, Barcelona, Constanza and Venlo have come together to implement actions in 4 fields:

• The production and distribution of clean energy.
• The sustainable design of its infrastructures.
• A modal change and optimisation of flows.
• Digital transformation

Actions

The different actions that will be carried out in the project include:

• Generation of renewable energy and deployment of electric, hydrogen and methanol vehicles.
• Modernisation of construction and heating networks to achieve energy efficiency and the application of circular economy approaches in infrastructure works.
• Deployment of digital platforms (with AI and 5G technologies) to promote the passenger and freight modal shift, ensure optimised movements and allocations of vehicles, vessels and containers, and facilitate vehicle automation.

These actions are aligned with other activities of the ports and their neighbouring urban communities and form an Open Innovation Network for exchange.

5 objectives

The ports involved have defined a series of objectives:

1. Reduce the total environmental footprint of the port by introducing clean energy.
2. Implement a sustainable port infrastructure beyond supply and demand of energy.
3. Introduce ecological improvements based on digitisation and new methods of operation.
4. Jointly define and transfer PIONEERS shares to other ports during the life cycle of the project.
5. A port master plan for the transition to greenhouse gas neutral shipping and increased multimodal mobility by 2050.